


Seven-Ten Split

by etherati



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Cecil is Human, Cecil likes cat videos, Domesticity, Fluff, Imprisonment, M/M, Moving In Together, Strexcorp, Violence, bowling, eth is being a downer again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 19:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are good things and bad things, and they are miles apart. It is a rare, ridiculous feat to manage hitting both of them with the same throw. Or: The future of community radio, brought to you by Strexcorp, Inc.</p><p>(Edited to fix Cecil's last name, as promised. That was fast!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven-Ten Split

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so, sometimes I wanna write fluff and porn and etc, and sometimes I just want to watch the world burn (as anyone who followed me here from Watchdom can attest). Spoilers for ‘Dana’, ‘Yellow Helicopters’, and the live show. Warnings for violence, imprisonment, blood, body horror, and bowling as written by someone who does not really bowl.

*

It is normal, Cecil thinks, for people on the radio and on television and wedged painfully into the corner of the public eye, to live a sort of duality. Two faces, two voices, two lives. That’s normal and expected, and if there’s an uncomfortable disconnect between what he remembers and what he _remembers_ , well— he tells himself that that’s normal too. 

Life’s a bit of a moving target, after all.

*

[[Three days in, there’s a list pinned to the corkboard in the break room.

Pushpins neatly skewer all four corners, and the heading is a mishmash of soft, unfamiliar corporate language. He is 'kindly advised' to 'seek out alternative topics and language' for his broadcasts. Some of the items on the list are obvious, like Desert Bluffs's poor athletic performance and Strexcorp’s HR and benefits record. Some are more unexpected: sun spiders, for instance, and the ecology of southeast Asia's riparian and benthic zones. Ham sandwiches, though apparently pastrami is fine. Dentistry. Trees. 

Cecil runs his finger down the list, dutifully memorizing it. It chafes, but this isn’t the first one he’s ever received, and at least this one hasn’t come soaked in intern blood.]]

*

It’s his turn to cook tonight, though they always eat at his place because Carlos doesn’t have any space aside from what sits above the lab. It’s cramped and unsafe, with all the chemicals and microbial life forms floating around, so they sit instead around the tiny round table in Cecil’s living room, plates and glasses and silverware intermingling and fighting for space. 

It is fantastically intimate.

It also leads to the occasional spill, especially when wine’s involved, but while his carpet may have complaints, Cecil has none. There’s something about leaning into another’s space and feeling the warmth of their blood and the solidity of their bones, to feel them living so completely even as their body is, as always and forever, slowly dying.

“Is it okay?” he asks into that narrow space, nervous. “I’ve never made it before,” he adds, as if he’s spent all night on a delicate chocolate and owl liver reduction and wants to be sure he didn’t break the texture. It’s actually just mac and cheese with nopales sliced into it and some broiled cuts of chicken. A meal his own mother used to make for him, though she always used boxed Kraft through sheer habit. This is a little more home-made. “I’m not sure if—”

“It’s fine, it’s wonderful,” Carlos says, reaching across to take Cecil’s hand in his, curl it up there like he wants to keep it, a treasure held close. His plate is empty already, so he must be speaking the truth. “We all need comfort food sometimes. Especially now.”

Cecil feels his brows draw together; something itches in the back of his head. “Why now?” he asks. “Why do we need comforting? Did something happen?”

But he doesn’t get an answer, because Carlos has leaned forward, is kissing and kissing him, is making him forget the question, forget his own name, forget the world.

*

[[He creeps out of the studio that night on silent feet, soft canvas sneakers caught up by two fingers. He’s never felt the need to be so careful, but the building is so _silent_ now; it makes his breath sound like the roar of a jet engine, makes him want to try not doing it for a while.

Then he comes upon The Door; Management’s door, just an ordinary wooden door with an ordinary glass window set into an ordinary frame trimmed with badly painted wood. But it’s as silent as the rest of the building. Cecil pauses in front of the door, straining his eyes and ears and the itchy place in the back of his skull that has always tingled like magnetism in the presence of the unknowable.

The glass is dark and fogged, vacant; the building creaks against the silence. He sets his fingers on the brass doorknob, rasps them over the ridges in the metalwork. The small hairs on the back of his hand stay flat and unelectrified. No incomprehensible terror settles into his bones.

He removes his hand, keeps walking. He knows when not to push his luck.]]

*

Sunsets are just sunsets and sunrises are just sunrises, Cecil remembers his grandfather telling him, visiting him in Night Vale for the first and only time in the aftermath of the 1983 Earthquake Dust Fire. Play one in reverse and it looks like the other. There’s a duality in these things.

The point was that there was nothing special in a beginning that would inevitably lead to an ending, or to an end that would come around again to a beginning. Those happened all the time, to everyone, everywhere. _Do not focus too long on this particular sunset_ , he’d said, _because then it will be night and you will be lost in the dark, and that’s no place for you._

 _Are there werewolves?_ ten-year-old Cecil had asked, sober. _Or squid-zombies_?

_Or worse things, shichai._

So he’s never really gotten why people so adore watching the sun on the horizon, in either direction, waxing poetic about something that happens literally every day. Except for those odd sunless days last week, or was that last month? Did that happen at all?

But Carlos makes him understand. 

Sitting out on the trunk of the car again, driven out to the edge of town this time—electrical lines soaring overhead and off into the distance along the highway, setting sun framed bloody and self-satisfied between them—Carlos makes him understand, with clumsy soft words and clumsy chapped hands and that way they both have of opening each other’s eyes to all the extraordinary things they’ve become jaded to.

Then darkness falls, and Carlos’s hand is warm inside his shirt, and he gets it. He understands.

*

[[Cecil stands in the hallway outside the booth. They’ve changed the lighting for no reason he can understand. Purple’s hard on the eyes, the workmen have told him— green is much better, easiest spectrum for human vision to handle. But it sounded like bullshit when they said it and it tastes like bullshit now, chewed over in the back of his throat, as he watches the sickly on-air light blaze from the wrong side of the glass.

A new morning show, supposedly. Which is a _problem_ , okay, because he needs to work on his own broadcast notes and he’s always used the dead-silent booth for that, wallowing in the mess of electronics and wires and decades of coffee stains like a place of power.

The figure in the booth has his back to the glass, is gesticulating toward the microphone like Cecil often does. He’s dressed as Cecil is, all frumpy station T-shirts and shorts, a mismatched pair of flip-flops. Management’s old habit of running the air conditioning until it screamed has been ended due to financial considerations, and summer in the desert is its own kind of primeval force, bowling over fashion and vanity and even the most basic concern for one’s own appearance. 

The microphone isn’t Cecil’s. It is glistening and horrid.

He wants to barge in and casually ruin the show, wants to demand to know where they’ve put _his_ mic, like a hostage negotiation. Wants to break the glass of the booth just to hear the noise of it, because out here it’s hard to be sure that anything he does matters.

Cecil reaches into his pocket instead; his phone is buzzing, and the text message reads, like they all do lately: _Be careful in there._

It’s enough; he bites back on his pride and stalks off to the break room to work, fist clenching and unclenching in his pocket until he occupies it in texting Carlos back that yes, he is being careful.]]

*

After the debacle with the condos—a debacle that was resolved oddly easily, as they tend to go—Cecil’s not interested in looking at any properties that the realtor isn’t willing to walk into ahead of them. That counts out about half of the plexes and standalone houses and maybe a third of the apartments, but there's still plenty of good options in both the cursed and uncursed categories.

Carlos votes for uncursed, somewhere between the duplex with the null-gravity dining room and the apartment with the (probably) innocently bleeding walls. 

"I figured you'd _like_ the antigravity field."

"It'd be great to study, don't get me wrong. But it might make meals kind of a pain?"

"Oh my." Cecil puts the back of his hand to his forehead in a faux swoon. "Giving up an opportunity for scientific study just to have dinner with me? I am touched, Carlos."

Carlos smiles, leans to press a kiss behind Cecil's ear. "I'm learning. Also, I don't really want to have to swim around to eat my breakfast cereal every single morning."

"Spoilsport," Cecil laughs, but takes the realtor aside and whispers the request quietly into the woman's ear. She looks back at Carlos, a little incredulous. Cecil shrugs, a _search me_ sort of gesture, but the next place they see is indeed beautiful— a townhouse with an open floor plan and wide glass windows and a surfeit of broad mirrors and an extra room that Carlos says will make a great lab space, and all the modern amenities and _no curses whatsoever_. Some of the rooms are maybe painted a little too garish a yellow, but there are no bizarre smells, no hauntings, no sentient spider colonies, just a floor and a ceiling and walls and a patio and in between, all the space to grow and love and live that they will ever need.

It is _perfect_.

*

[[A few weeks in, they assign him a guard during his broadcasts. They don’t _call_ it a guard, the thuggish, three-armed monstrosity that looms over the desk while he hunches his head and closes his eyes and shakes, and tries so hard to speak to his city. Their city. Someone’s city. But that’s what it is—insurance against Cecil running off or sabotaging the equipment or saying something inappropriate. His mic is his own, at least, the same one he’s always used, but there are always bloody circles on the desk now, like coffee rings that bleach black in the queasy green light. He cleans them off every night and they’re back again by the next day, the footprint of another microphone, another sort of mouthpiece.

 _Be careful,_ Carlos still texts him, _Please,_ though he rarely replies anymore. There is nothing he can say that is both honest and encouraging.

The day comes when the guard follows him into the hallway, tromping, and blocks his way to the building exit. The directive is thrust toward him in a neat, crisp white envelope. _Mr. Palmer,_ it reads, _It has come to our attention that you are removing station equipment from the premises every night. This is to cease immediately._

He furrows his brow; that makes no sense, unless they’re upset that he occasionally walks off with a highlighter behind his ear. Then he sees the postscript: _To clarify, Mr. Palmer, you were included in the contract of sale under the heading of ‘broadcast equipment’._

The guard growls, low and dangerous.

Cecil sleeps in the break room that night, amidst scattered coffee filters and the ashy ghosts of interns. He writes and deletes text messages, writes and deletes. He does not sleep well.]]

*

There’s no real warning or explanation, the day Dana comes back. Which doesn’t make much sense, since she’d been in an alternate plane of reality last he checked, or maybe a _ghost_. It’d been hard to be sure. Still, it’s not like stranger things haven’t ever happened, and when his phone lights up with her name on the ID he is, as always, willing to believe for a blissful second that she’s calling from his front stairs.

This time, that turns out to be exactly the case.

Cecil stands in the doorway for a few seconds, staring at her disheveled figure in shock; then he hugs her up into the air and drops her inside, offers to make coffee, shouts to Carlos to come see, what a wonderful surprise!

The rest is all happy reunion and stories about all the interns she’s missed out on, and Carlos grousing that he’s a scientist—not a technical support representative—but still managing to get Cecil’s laptop hooked up to the living room television. It is time, Cecil has decided, for some celebratory YouTube. F-U-N-N-Y C-A-T-S, he types in, a slow hunt-and-peck.

“So, why did you come _here?_ ” Cecil asks a few minutes into the first video, because Dana has family, he thought, and presumedly friends her own age, and this seems a little odd. The question is odd too, he knows, but he also somehow knows that he won’t offend her, that for this span of lucid seconds, social rules have stopped applying.

On the screen, a cat wearing a noodle cup on its head tumbles out of a shoebox. 

“Where else could I go?” she asks, nonchalant. “Everything around here has changed so much, I didn’t know where to find anyone else.”

Something about the answer makes the back of his eyes itch, but then the video glitches, flashes to something yellow and orange and uncomfortable to look at. Cecil feels his heart rate spike without even knowing why.

Then the video cuts to a cat swimming morosely around in a bathtub, and it’s okay, everything is okay, and they just laugh and laugh.

*

[[It’s the middle of the night, long after the show has ended and Cecil has packed his equipment away and then, for no reason he can determine, has spent a good two hours sprawled backwards over the desk. His head’s been tipped back over the floor long enough for the blood to start pooling behind his eyes, temples feeling like they’re going to blow wide open. He is wrung out on sleep deprivation and strung out on fear and lightheadedness. He is reckless with regret. 

His phone sits on the floor, walled in by the pale fall of his hair, upside down so he can read the messages as they arrive: _Where are you?_ and _Are they keeping you overnight again?_ and _cecil, please answer me, it’s getting really bad out here_

_tell me youre okay_

_cecil please_

It isn’t that he’s trying to make Carlos worry; he would _never_. The very thought is, well, unthinkable. But he just can’t seem to reach the phone right now, things being how they are, and there’s never any point in trying to change how things are.]]

*

It’s league night at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, and they’re all perched around the ball return up on lane 27— Dana sitting up on the little table dividing the lanes, kicking her feet in the air, and Josie poking at the computer to see if there’s any way to change her name, because she accidentally entered it as ‘Jose’ and it’s been bothering her all night. Cecil’s hovering over the ball return itself, waiting for the glittery purple shine of his ball to appear. 

They’re on fire tonight, all three of them, and this is the last frame and his last throw and they are so close to beating the visiting team from Desert Bluffs, hideous in their yellow and orange shirts, that they can collectively taste it. It tastes a little like snow cones and licorice, they’ve agreed, with some grape jelly and pastrami mixed in.

Carlos is here too, of course, with the jacket that Cecil had printed to say ‘Official Team Scientist’, though it’s not often a bowling team really needs any science done so he’s more of a combination mascot/good luck charm. He lounges back on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, spins it idly a quarter turn back and forth with one toe; Cecil can feel him watching. He pulls the ball off of the spinning rollers, lifts it up to his chest.

It’s not like Carlos is here for every game, nor is it true that they win every game he’s present for. But they’re _so close_ tonight—it’s almost all he can think: so close, so close—it’s within reach, it’s not a lost cause, and maybe they need a little nudge over the edge or maybe they don’t, but— 

“If you make this spare,” Carlos says from behind him; he hears the creak of the chair as Carlos leans forward, intent. “I’ll help you celebrate, later.”

Childish whoops and hoots from his teammates at that, and Cecil suddenly feels so hot and tight under his ribs that he could die from it. He looks back; Carlos is looking right at him, smiling like he did the first day they met, unselfconscious and unashamed.

Cecil takes a breath as he turns back to the lane, tests the weight of the ball in his hands...

*

[[He stares at his phone in disconnected shock. His neck itches; it has been a week or so since he’s showered, though he can’t remember exactly why. The phone is telling him that Carlos is coming to get him, damn the consequences. He is going to take Cecil out of this place.

That isn’t how it will actually happen.

He knows this with a clarity that had nothing to do with past or present or future or anything he knows about any of them. It is just a fact, immutable. He will hear Carlos shouting in the hallway, and he will see the door push open and watch his love stumble through, reaching for him, already broken and bleeding from the scuffle outside, and then the creature guarding him will appear above and behind Carlos, looming, the pair of them framed in the doorway as backlit silhouettes. He will watch, in paralyzed slow-time, as the claws come down— 

No. He spent too long staring at the phone, he realizes. All of this is happening now.

Blood hits the desktop like candle wax.]]

*

...he steps forward, shoes cooly slick on the wood laminate of the floor, rolls his arm forward in a loose, graceful underhand arc...

*

*

*

“Tch,” Kevin tuts, leaning against the desk. The technicians are almost through, and the situation is certainly salvageable, but it’s not ideal. “It’s such a shame. He was a real talent. Needed some oversight, but an excellent way with words.”

“Won’t need supervising now,” one of the techs mumbles, picking through a jeweler’s kit for exactly the right tiny screwdriver. It’s delicate work, especially these hippocampal connectors. “You’ll be able to head back home.”

Kevin leans in, brings himself eye to eye with the cadaverous figure strapped to the chair, dozens of cables and wires embedded in his scalp. The long pale hair is shaved away in the spots where they connect, and the skin there is angry, starting to blacken in bruises. The figure’s lips move soundlessly, mouthing advertisements and traffic reports like a muted television.

His eyes are dark and empty. They’ll have to hire him a writer.

“Can’t be helped, I suppose,” Kevin says, holding that vacant stare for a few more seconds before breaking away. “Reality isn’t for everyone, is it?”

“I’ve had my share of issues with it.” The tech’s not really interested. He’s making the conversation he’s expected to make. He presses the tip of the driver in, tweaks something miniscule. A tiny muscle in the cheek twitches.

“It’s better this way,” Kevin says. “For him _and_ for us.”

“Don’t need to convince me.”

“Oh, I know,” he says, and nods to himself—and on the way out, is careful not to disrupt too much of the fresh new coating of blood on the floor.

*

*

*

… and the ball shatters the air like a hammer on glass; it hangs there for a moment, spinning against gravity, before it comes back down to meet the lane and hooks to the left and blasts through the distant pair of pins in a perfect, triumphant obliteration. 

Then Josie is cheering and Dana is punching the air and Carlos—! His beautiful Carlos is stepping up from the sidelines, is stepping into his arms and pulling him off his feet and saying wonderful, beautiful things, and he feels loved and in control and out of control and victorious and perfect—and if he had to, Cecil could live in this moment for the rest of his life.

*


End file.
